to engage in paramilitary politics and sought to apply military values (discipline, obedience, anti-hedonism) to society at large. Whereas traditional conservatives were wary of even right-wing populism, fascists were eager to mobilize the masses—but for socially reactionary not socially radical ends (Gustave Le Bon was a precursor here). In doing so, fascists echoed an ideal that traditional conservatives also promoted: that material differences between the upper and lower classes were unimportant compared to "spiritual" values and the unity of the nation. French fascists urged their followers to revive the "spirit of the trenches" of the First World War where workers and bourgeois, peasants and aristocrats fought side by side against the nation's enemies, including domestic enemies. Soucy believes that at various times La Rocque's movement displayed all of the above features. Soucy maintains that in the 1930s the more that non-fascist authoritarian conservatives (and even many previously democratic conservatives) felt threatened by the political Left, the greater was their susceptibility to fascism. For French conservatives who chose a fascist alternative, no serious assault on the economic interests of traditional elites was required. A recurring theme in fascist writings from Valois, Taittinger and Coty to La Rocque, Marcel Bucard and Doriot—as well as from Mussolini to Hitler—was that class conflict (especially workers' strikes) should be replaced with nationalistic class conciliation (on conservative terms). In a number of cases during the Great Depression, differences between fascist and non-fascist conservatives gave way to "fusion"—with ideological interpenetration taking place in both directions as a result of common interest. According to Soucy, when French fascist intellectuals like Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle employed "anti-bourgeois" rhetoric, they were referring to "decadent" bourgeois (secular, liberal, democratic, hedonistic, soft-on-Marxism bourgeois), not "virile" bourgeois. After 1936, in response to the rise of the Popular Front, many previous French fascists and others who were counterrevolutionary, Catholic, traditionalist and reactionary crossed over to La Rocque's PSF. This was also true of some democratic conservatives who had previously viewed La Rocque with repugnance but who were now willing to overlook the many anti-democratic statements and paramilitary threats to overthrow the government that he had made before 1936. When the new Popular Front government banned the paramilitary CF in the summer of 1936, La Rocque replaced it with the PSF, claiming that he was now a political democrat (an alleged conversion that was quickly forgotten in 1941 when he became a